Conventional analyses have pinned the blame on the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram (which means: “Western education is forbidden”). But according to the Guardian’s Nafeez Ahmed, the real culprit is ‘climate change.’

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Ahmed writes:

Instability in Nigeria, however, has been growing steadily over the last decade – and one reason is climate change. In 2009, a UK Department for International Development (Dfid) study warned that climate change could contribute to increasing resource shortages in the country due to land scarcity from desertification, water shortages, and mounting crop failures.A more recent study by the Congressionally-funded US Institute for Peace confirmed a “basic causal mechanism” that “links climate change with violence in Nigeria.” The report concludes:

Unfortunately, a business-as-usual scenario sees Nigeria’s climate undergoing “growing shifts in temperature, rainfall, storms, and sea levels throughout the twenty-first century. Poor adaptive responses to these shifts could help fuel violent conflict in some areas of the country.”

According to the late Prof Sabo Bako of Ahmadu Bello University, the 1980s “forerunner” to Boko Haram was the Maitatsine sect in northern Nigeria, whose members included many victims of ecological disasters leaving them in “a chaotic state of absolute poverty and social dislocation in search of food, water, shelter, jobs, and means of livelihood.”

The article is by no means Ahmed’s first attempt to exculpate Islamist terrorists’ actions by implying that the West is, in fact, mainly to blame. He is also a 9/11 Truther.

In fact, overwhelming evidence confirms that al-Qaeda networks in the Middle East, Central Asia, the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Asia-Pacific, have been penetrated and manipulated by Western intelligence services. Conspiraloonery? If only it was. As I argue in my 3rd book, The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism (2005), the evidence for this is extremely well-documented, deriving from innumerable, credible intelligence sources. But why? Largely to destabilize regional environments to pave the way for new “security” policies that serve to protect not people, but foreign investors taking over regional markets — especially markets with significant oil and gas deposits.

Ahmed’s work has been praised by luminaries including left-wing journalist John Pilger, who wrote:

And also by the Independent’s Yasmin Alibhai Brown:

And by the Sunday Times’s Bryan Appleyard:

And by the late Gore Vidal:

“Yes, yes, I know he is one of Them. But they often know things that we don’t – particularly about what we are up to.”

But not all his readers were quite so impressed. The late Christopher Hitchens described him as:

These quotes were, until recently, available on Ahmed’s website. However, following a critical blog post by one of his fellow environmentalists Robert Wilson, Ahmed’s posts on 9/11 mysteriously disappeared.

Last month, Ahmed launched an attack on Breitbart London which he described as a “sorry stain on British journalism.”